Marianne Schultz

the musings of a geeky girl

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Mobile Maps navigation app – more first impressions

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I’ve started to use the Mobile Maps turn-by-turn navigation app that I mentioned the other day and it’s working out quite well so far. It runs smoothly and has gotten me to all of my destinations without any problems, though it gave me a more round-about way to get to one than I would have liked (and different from the route my TomTom Go 720 gives me for this same destination).

What I like so far:
  • Quick route re-calculation
  • Good graphics
  • Reliable – hasn’t lost the GPS signal or gotten confused at all
  • Tells me which side of the road my destination is on!
  • Highway lane guidance display
What I don’t like so far:
  • Voice guidance volume is too low, even at highest volume setting
  • No way to search all POI categories at once
  • No integration with contacts list
I’ll be testing it more to see how it handles incoming and outgoing phone calls and trips with more than one destination. I’m also going to see how it runs on my iPhone 3G compared to my iPhone 3GS.
To be honest, I expected it to make my iPhone run really hot, but it doesn’t. It gets slightly warm to the touch, but that’s it, even when I’ve got my iPhone plugged in with my car charger at the same time. Running it off the battery alone with the screen on all the time didn’t result in as drastic a decrease in my battery charge as I’d expected, to boot. Definitely good so far…

The madness must stop. I think.

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The iPhone 3GS release frenzy is winding down a bit and I’ve had a little time to reflect. I have purchased each new iPhone model on release day and have even procured spare iPhones to use as back-ups along the way. Why do I need more than one iPhone? I don’t know. What I do know is that this is crazy. I can’t really keep this up if Apple is going to release a new iPhone every year, can I?

Of course, this train of thought prompted me to think of what could possible be changed hardware-wise in the next iPhone generation. An even better camera? Definitely. A slimmer or smaller design? Possibly. A high-res screen, perhaps with OLED technology? Faster internals to keep up with more demanding firmware and apps? Perhaps. But will these things be enough for me to upgrade yet again? Can’t I just be happy for more than 12 months with my shiny new iPhone 3GS?
To be clear, I haven’t been the kind of girl to keep a cell phone for very long, ever. I think that my first-generation and 3G iPhones have been the cell phones I’ve kept the longest, putting me at a maximum of 1 year of cell phone monogamy, so to speak. But, even while I had my iPhones, I was tempted by other phones. The Blackberry Storm called to me with its large screen and empty promises of stability and usability. The T-Mobile G1 flirted outrageously, flaunting its Android operating system while vaguely pretending to be slim and svelte. The Pre was probably the most tempting, slyly reminding me of fond memories of past Palm devices, but the 3GS easily drew my attention once it was released.
Regardless, I am happy with my new 32GB iPhone 3GS (the 16GB I started out with is being returned). I still look fondly at my factory-unlocked 3G, but its slowness compared to my 3GS is noticeable enough to make me think it’s going on eBay sooner rather than later. And I suspect that, despite my best intentions, Apple will again woo me with a new device next year.
In related news, Apple has posted a couple of helpful bits of information on their support site. They’ve published this chart showing Bluetooth profiles under 3.0 for all iPhone models here:
Note the incomplete implementation of the AVRCP profile that does not permit skip forward/backward and fast-forward/backward capability even if your accessory has controls for these functions.
And, they’ve also published a chart of 3.0 capabilities by iPhone model, which can also be called a “See what you’re missing by not buying the latest iPhone model” chart as well:
Sneaky boogerheads.
My iPhone 3GS vs. 3G vs. first-generation iPhone comparison review is coming along. I want to include some video samples and I’ve been waiting for some nicer weather to get some good video of my dog running around like a nut in the yard. According to the forecast, Saturday will probably be the day for that as it looks like we’ll get a brief reprieve from this endless cloudiness and rain.

I am a weak, weak geek who has been wooed by iPhone 3.0 beta 3

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I did it. I upgraded my iPhone 3G to the 3.0 beta 3 (thanks, Rick!). Yes, I said I wasn’t going to do it before. I know, I know. But how could I resist? Everything I was reading indicated that this beta was working really well, showing none of the lag or glitches present in the first beta. And, IT CAN DO MMS. Well, technically, anyway –  I haven’t been able to send or receive any yet thanks to the exertion of absolutely no effort whatsoever on my part to get it to work.

How is it, you ask? It’s been pretty good, with only 2 noticeable glitches and one mistake made by yours truly. The first glitch is a disappearing call button in the phone’s dial pad – see the screenshot below. Re-starting the iPhone fixes that, but it somehow reverts back after a little while. I’m not the only who’s seen this – Patrick over at JAIB has as well. I’ve gotten around it by using the keypad in the GV Dialer app and then choosing to make a Direct Call from there. If I didn’t have the GV Dialer app, I think I’d be far more put off by this glitch without a way to initiate a call to someone not in my contacts list.
What’s missing from this picture?
The second glitch is some battery meter inaccuracy during charging. I noticed this when I went to charge my iPhone on Saturday after forgetting to charge it overnight on Friday. When I set it in the dock, the battery meter immediately went to full even though it was at less than 50% when I put it in, and this full reading persisted when I removed it from the dock right away. I didn’t bother re-starting it, which might have fixed this issue, and just kept charging it since I knew it needed it anyway.
The aforementioned mistake was in relation to Notes. I was inordinately excited about the ability to sync Notes between my iPhone and the notes in the Mail application on my Mac, but when I had problems syncing my iPhone, I chose an “overwrite items on this iPhone with data on my Mac” option at some point that over-wrote all my notes on my iPhone. I’m a little bummed about this since I kept ongoing shopping lists and other minutiae there. They’re saved in the back-up file made before I upgraded to 3.0, so I might try to find a way to extract them and even re-create them if I have to. Despite this, I am very happy to be able to create and edit notes on my Mac and my iPhone and have them all stay in sync with each other. Why Apple didn’t do this from the beginning I’ll never understand.
I’m also happy to report that Google Maps works flawlessly, which was a concern of mine after reading reports of it not working well in the first beta.
I know there are supposedly over 100 new features (!) in 3.0 – there’s a good list of them here – but they don’t stand out to me extraordinarily in daily use unless I think about it. I like having landscape mode available when reading and writing emails, notes, and text messages. I’ve used copy and paste, though I find I activate it often when I don’t mean to when double-tapping to zoom. NetShare still seems to work (yay!) though very slowly. I don’t use the search function much but I like that it’s now an option. I am very pleased that I can now choose to open a link in a new page in Safari. 
There is one thing for which I am exceptionally grateful in 3.0 – the ability to turn off those damned repeat notifications for new text messages. I really only need one notification to let me know I’ve received a text message.  The additional ones made me think I’d received another message, causing me to check and then be immediately disappointed that I’m not nearly popular enough to have received more than one at a time.  Whose brilliant idea was that in the first place? I curse the engineer who thought this would be a good feature. A pox on you and yours!

Why my friends and family are afraid of the iPhone 3.0 firmware

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Well, they’re not exactly afraid of it now, but they will be. You want to know why? MMS. Yeah, that’s it. MMS. 

For the past year and a half, roughly, they’ve lived in relative peace, receiving only text messages from me to communicate my location, ask if anything is needed from the grocery store while I’m there, and other mundane things. I’m not sure why, but I’ve evolved (or de-volved, depending on your opinion on the state of human interaction relative to modern technology) into the type of girl who’d rather exchange texts than talk on the phone with someone when I’m not at home. I mean, I’ll do it if I get a call while I’m out and bored or I’m going to be in one spot for a little while to make a conversation feasible without interruptions or unduly disturbing others around me. But I’d much rather have my conversations in private, what with my potty mouth and all. It’s safer that way, particularly for the children around me whose parents clap their hands swiftly and firmly over their ears when they hear what I’m saying. (Actually, I’m not that bad in public – I do watch my mouth, I swear.)
Anyway, I’ve really missed not being able to send MMS messages, and I intend to make up for the recent past when this hasn’t been possible with my iPhones as soon as 3.0 is out. For starters, my husband will receive MMS pictures of every damn funny thing I see when he’s not with me. Unfortunately for him, I am easily amused. Very easily amused. 
Next, my friends will get numerous pictures of my dog doing silly things, which occurs often, though this is probably more a function of the fact that I’m very easily amused. If my mother remembers how to open the messaging application on the Samsung A747 I helped her pick out a couple of years ago, she’ll get videos of me assuring her that I am indeed alive and in one piece after I miss one of her phone calls and fail to call her back within 1.34642 seconds of receiving the voicemail she leaves. My dad will receive short instructional videos on how to navigate through the Macintosh operating system on the iBook I gave him for Christmas years ago in response to his infamously long voicemails asking me what the red, yellow, and green buttons do in the top left corner of every window he opens, or who this Sherlock character is and what else can he do besides show movie times.
Do I have your cell phone number? If I do, you should mentally prepare yourself now. If I don’t, well, count your lucky stars.

I am a geek. But I’m not upgrading to the iPhone 3.0 beta yet.

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Bear with me on this one. I am a geek, and as a geek, it is my sworn duty to own the first versions of all gadgets that entice me with their sleek shininess. This satisfies the greedy tech monster – a smaller yet more furry and orange version of the Cookie Monster, if you will – inside me and allows me to show off to all my friends who accordingly “ooh” and “aah” over my cool new toys. Before you go off and say how I end up just being a beta tester for manufacturers who put out new products without adequate QA to ensure they work the way they should for the majority of users, this term does not apply to me. I am a geek, dammit. This is what I do. And I love it.
With that said, it is incredibly hard for me to say that I don’t think I’m going to upgrade to the iPhone 3.0 firmware beta. I’ve been hemming and hawing about this one, much like Patrick over at JAIB, but I’ve been reading through some of the bug lists users have posted on forums and I just don’t think I could live for 4 more months with some of those issues, assuming the final version of 3.0 is released in July with no updates until then. Let me explain…
I love my iPhone. My iPhone is in my hand even when I walk around the house. I check my email regularly, catch up on Twitter, browse the internet, check movie listings, read ebooks and my RSS feeds, and so much more multiple times a day, which I can do anywhere and anytime thanks to my iPhone. I’m not a big YouTube fan, but I do use it to find web videos that accompany current events and tech news and reviews. My battery lasts me all day on 2.2.1, even if I don’t charge it in the middle of the day at work. And while I don’t text a ridiculous amount, I do rely on it a lot and need it to work consistently. I also regularly use Maps to get around since my GPS unit pretty much stays in my car, and it’s saved me and my friends from walking miles when we thought a restaurant was closer than it was and vice versa in planning on taking a taxi when we didn’t need to. 
From what I’ve been reading online, it sounds like many of the 3.0 bugs so far affect the features and functions that I count on and use the most.
Add to this that my previous smartphone, a Treo 680, was buggy as hell. Yes, I got it the week it came out, but Palm had been working on Palm OS smartphones for years by that time, so I didn’t consider it as a truly new device that would have a plethora of bugs as such, but it did. I was sick and tired of dealing with its utter crappiness and even my 1.0 iPhone was a blessing of stability and a solid feature set in comparison. 
So, what I’m trying to say is that I just don’t think I can handle my iPhone flaking out on me given how much I rely on it. I’m not chicken. I’m not. I’m still a geek. I am. I am, I tell you! Right?
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